Director Rama Burshtein was born in New York in 1967. She graduated from the Sam Spiegel Film and
Television School in Jerusalem in 1994. During those years, Rama became deeply religious and upon her
graduation she dedicated herself to promoting film as a tool for self expression in the Orthodox community.
In her own words, Rama shares her thoughts and feelings about her first feature film Fill the Void.

mute. It’s fine for someone on the outside to interpret
us as long as someone on the inside is telling a story.
Our political voice is loud—even boisterous—but our
artistic and cultural voice remains muffled and faint.
I’m not good at agendas and politics. What I am good
at is telling a story. I’m good at telling about those
things I’m passionate about, and what can I do? They
are all tied to the ultra-Orthodox world of observance.

Story
It began with the fact that my work has always
focused on relationships between men and women.
Marriages are never forced in Judaism. In the
Hasidic world in which this film is set, parents
do raise proposed matches with their children,
but even then the young couple must agree.
I was chatting with someone at the wedding of
a friend’s daughter when a pretty young girl no
older than eighteen came up to our table. She was
wearing a gold watch, diamond earrings, and a ring
that highlighted the stone in its setting—a clear
indication that she was recently engaged. My friend
congratulated her with a warm mazal tov but, still there
was something a little odd about their conversation.
When the girl left, my friend said to me: “Did you
see that pretty young thing? She got engaged a
month ago to the husband of her late sister.”
That was all I needed to set my imagination
into overdrive. All it needed was a brief time
to stew within me before I came up with the
outline for the story of Fill the Void.

Motivation
I set out on this journey out of a deep sense of pain.
I felt that the ultra-Orthodox community has no voice
in the cultural dialogue. You might even say we are

Fill the Void has nothing whatsoever to do with
the religious-secular dialogue. That doesn’t interest
me quite as much. Fill the Void opens a peephole
into a tiny story taken from a very special and
complex world. By its very definition, it avoids
making any comparison between the two worlds.
It has enough self-confidence to tell its own story. I
believe that the only way to bridge these two worlds
is through unprejudiced honesty. If there is to be
such a bridge, it must emerge from some common
denominator that can be found in the heart.

Jane Austen
I love Jane Austen. She’s romantic, intelligent, and
full of humor. I read her as a girl and I’ve seen films
based on her work. The parallel is also quite obvious
in that Fill the Void takes place in a world where
the rules are rigid and clear. The characters are not
looking for some way to burst out of that world.
Instead, they are trying to find a way to live within it.
Fill the Void has a historical air about it. It could just
as easily have been located in the Poland of the last
century, in Brooklyn, or now in Tel Aviv. It is somewhat
cut off from the modern world, and the complications
that make up the plot and their resolution have much
in common with the way Jane Austen tells a story.